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Anytime, Jim |
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Written by Dylan Purcell
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Monday, 08 February 2010 |
Jim Whitelaw is welcome to “talk my leg off” any time he wants.
On Monday, I settled down at my desk and read a handwritten letter from the former LCI football and basketball head coach. He ran the Rams for 29 years while teaching physical education at the school.
Legend says Whitelaw retired in 1979 but I say a good coach is a good coach and all that changes are the balls and the rules.
Whitelaw is one of the grand examples of that, having won championships in football and basketball with the LCI Rams. I should write, with his LCI Rams. He named them, he coached them and he built a legacy which lasted for a long, long time.
Whitelaw earned a masters degree from the University of Southern California in 1950, the year before he joined the staff at Lethbridge Collegiate Institute. Yes, he graduated from that USC and yes, he named the LCI teams after the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL.
Whitelaw’s Rams won titles at roughly the rate an elephant goes through peanuts.
His Ram footballers won 19 southern Alberta championships, the highest level of competition at the time, and at one time remained undefeated for five consecutive years.
Whitelaw’s basketball Ram accomplishments were just as impressive. His teams garnered Alberta Provincial Championships in 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965, and 1979. Many of his players went on to impressive college, university and professional careers in both sports.
One of his players, Dave Adams, arrived at LCI from a top basketball school in New York state for his Grade 11 year. Regardless of Adams’ pedigree, he said he learned a lot as a player from Whitelaw. The CIAU all-star and now coach of the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns men’s basketball team said those lessons remain.
So does the passion. Whitelaw is a staunch supporter of athletics, not just limited to his former players and teams.
My letter from Whitelaw talks about the changes in the Pronghorns team from last season. It mentions the positive energy Adams brings to everything. Adams mentions the clipboard Whitelaw had to snap in half to make a point once.
“I was a little wild with my turnovers and coach Whitelaw had to make sure I understood exactly what he was talking about,” laughs Adams. “He was passionate about every detail of the game and it was infectious, I’ll tell you. I still have to smile when I think about him snapping that clipboard because I kept losing that ball.”
Whitelaw wasn’t the fire-breathing, clipboard-snapping coach, however. I looked closely at my letter from the godfather of LCI sports and saw an excited passion between the lines. He still attends games and I’m sure he agonizes over each fundamental breakdown and thrills with each well executed play.
He was a coach for 29 years around here.
According to Adams, a phone call from Coach Whitelaw will be more about defensive switches than how-do-you-dos, probably because Whitelaw still has a thing or two to teach Adams.
“You know, when I talk to him, I remember how little the game has changed,” said Adams, the oldest coach in the Canada West Conference. “He retired, what, 30 years ago? But he still can see how a play unfolds and what you have to do to stop it or how to make it work.”
As years pile up, they can take away energy. Age can make the mind forgetful and the hands shaky. Judging from his handwriting and his recall of days gone by, 30 years of retirement has simply heated the forge. Whitelaw writes as if he could still pace the Rams’ sidelines. Those watermelon stripes on the basketball shorts were his idea, after all.
Famous UCLA coach John Wooden used to teach his players how to put on their socks. He would show them how to roll the socks on to avoid blisters or uncomfortable folds. After teaching how to put one sock on, the 10-time national champion basketball coach would say, “Now, on to the other foot.”
Wooden’s rules were simple, and you played by them. You praised your teammates for helping you accomplish individual goals, you didn’t swear and you earned respect, you didn’t demand it.
Whitelaw and Wooden are from the same generation. And from the sounds of it, the same school of coaching.
Whitelaw has earned my respect. Although we’ve never met, I know what he’s done for me.
Aside from his accomplishments with the LCI Rams, he was one of the originators of the Lethbridge Minor Football League and was one of the southern Alberta representatives to the founding meetings of the Alberta Scholastic Athletic Association which still governs all high school sports in the province.
Among his many awards of recognition, Whitelaw earned the 1968 Alberta Coaches’ Urban High School Football Award; the Robert A. Routledge Award of Merit in 1978; and a spot on the Lethbridge Sports Hall of Fame for Sports Building and Multi-Sports in 1986.
An avid golfer, Whitelaw has to his credit two southern Alberta Open Golf Championships, a city of Lethbridge Open Championship, two Country Club titles and two Norrie Macleod Senior Men's Championships.
As well, in 1982, he represented Alberta in national competition on the Senior Men's Golf Team.
Whitelaw has already filled several lifetimes coaching, teaching, mentoring and inspiring students. He’s a mentor to some of southern Alberta’s best and brightest. And since retirement, he been able to digest even more, stoking the passion that fuelled years of coaching and learning all the while.
“Maybe sometime I’ll meet up with you and I could ‘talk your leg off,’” he wrote.
Ready when you are, Jim.
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